Can a hit YouTube channel thrive after its founder departs?
The King of Random had 8 million YouTube subscribers when Grant Thompson suddenly decided he didn't want to create videos anymore.
About three years ago, Larry Shapiro got the kind of phone call a talent manager never wants to receive. It came from Grant Thompson, a YouTuber he’d been working with for about a year. “I live in Los Angeles,” Shapiro told me in a phone interview. “I’m out on the weekend, doing my errands, and I get a call from Grant, and Grant is a very spiritual person who places a lot of value in his faith. The first thing he said to me was, ‘I was spoken to last night, and I was told not to do this anymore.’” Thompson went on to explain that he no longer had any interest in creating YouTube videos and wanted to spend more time with his wife and kids.
By that point, Thompson’s YouTube channel, The King of Random, had 8 million subscribers. Each video averaged over a million views, and some of his most popular had generated tens of millions. Shapiro was in the process of turning the channel into a huge business, but now its only star was saying he wanted to walk away from it all.
Luckily for Shapiro, Thompson’s sudden epiphany wasn’t entirely unexpected. He had been complaining of burnout for months, and the two were in the process of hiring several people to help with the behind-the-scenes production.
One of those hires was Nate Bonham, a sculptor by training who was brought on to help Thompson build out the machines and scientific experiments that appeared in his videos. Shortly after speaking to Shapiro, Thompson then rang up Bonham to deliver the bad news. “He said, ‘hey, I’m really sorry, but I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m just planning to shut this whole channel down. Do you think you can get your old job back?’”
Bonham figured he probably could get his job back, but he didn’t want to give up on this one just yet. “So I suggested that if he didn’t want to be in videos anymore, I could try being in the videos,” he told me. This idea caught Thompson by surprise, and, after mulling it over for a few moments, he agreed to give it a try. Bonham was on vacation and had stepped away from his family to take the call. “When I came back to them I was like, ‘I have no idea what my life is going to be like when I get home.’”
Within days, Bonham started showing up in King of Random videos — sometimes by himself, other times alongside Thompson. “At first Grant’s day-to-day involvement was high, because I didn’t know how to do anything,” Bonham recalled. “But it was always his goal to get hands off where he could step away from the channel, so it was a fairly progressive move from showing me how to do everything, to backing off where he didn’t have to do anything for months at a time.”
Thompson had built his entire channel on the back of his experiments, and this was his biggest experiment yet: could a YouTube channel with a massive following thrive after its founder departs?
It’s a question that’s becoming increasingly relevant as the creator economy matures. Many of today’s biggest social media stars built their huge audiences through round-the-clock publishing that required long workdays. While this pace is sustainable in your teens and early 20s, it’s not uncommon for it to eventually lead to burnout, especially for those who want to settle down and start a family. This has led to more and more creators attempting to pivot their businesses so they are less dependent on their personal brands; some even want to sell their channels and walk away entirely.
But will 8 million people who have watched a channel over a span of five years simply accept the introduction of a new host? In 2017, Bonham found himself thrown into the deep end, not knowing whether he’d sink or swim. Over the next three years, he had to find his creative voice, build a scalable team, and reckon with the tragic death of his mentor.
In a phone interview, both he and Shapiro walked me through how they handled the transition and built The King of Random into a multi-platform media company with several revenue streams.
Let’s dive into my findings:
The birth of a channel
In the earliest King of Random videos posted a decade ago, Thompson’s face rarely appears; a video titled “How to Make Slime (Ninja Turtle Ooze),” which currently has over 20 million views, features only his hands and voice narration as he walks the viewer through the various ingredients and modifications. Most of these videos are less than five minutes long and seek to illustrate some cool-yet-simple concept, like how to light a fire using a clear plastic bag of your own urine or instantly freeze a bottle of water.
The consistent throughline for The King of Random — which spans from its first videos to those produced today — is a sense of wonder at what can be accomplished with household items and a basic understanding of science. I initially assumed, while watching these videos, that Thompson had a background as some type of engineer; it was only later that I found out that his pre-YouTube career consisted of flying planes and selling real estate. “Grant didn’t start out wanting to make a big popular YouTube channel,” said Shapiro. “He started it because he had stuff he was curious about and wanted to explore. He was documenting his process as he did that, and when he would learn about something interesting, he’d do a video explaining it or demonstrating it, and that often involved building something to show off that principle.”
Thompson’s first big hit came in 2013 when he uploaded a video on how to make a miniature metal foundry. The video attracted millions of views and triggered a substantial boost in channel subscribers. Encouraged by his success, he switched to a consistent publishing schedule, aiming to put out a new video every Tuesday. In late 2013, he promoted his first video sponsor (Audible). In January 2014, he hit 1 million subscribers and celebrated by jumping out of a plane while wearing a tuxedo.
For the next few years, Thompson continued to simply narrate the videos while keeping the camera pointed away from his face, but starting in 2016 he became a much more visible presence on the channel. That year, he uploaded a Q&A video where he explains that he spent the previous five years working eight to 12 hours a day, six days a week. “I’m physically, mentally, and emotionally giving it everything I’ve got….honestly I’m getting tired,” he says. “I need to take a little break.” He also reveals that he just quit his day job.
In a follow-up Q&A, Thompson expresses his desire to hire a production crew and “make the channel bigger than myself.” He soon began regularly collaborating with other large YouTubers and increased the output of videos, eventually achieving the breakneck pace of one video per day. He also started thinking about how to generate more revenue from the channel.
That’s when Larry Shapiro came into the picture. He had started his career in the late 1980s in film production, working mostly on music videos. “At the time, music video directors like David Fincher and Michael Bay were shaping the next generation of Hollywood production values,” he said. Later, he joined CAA as an agent. “I launched the video games division there. I was the first agent in Hollywood to work with video game designers.”
In the 2010s, Shapiro got into talent management, taking a job at the multi-channel network Fullscreen. From his perspective, YouTube creators were poised to reshape the entertainment industry, much in the same way as those music video directors had in the 90s. “What’s brilliant about online creators is they don’t need a network or studio to validate them,” he explained. “They don’t need that connection.” In 2015, he struck off on his own to start his own talent management company.
It was a few years later when Thompson began casting about for a manager. “When I met Grant, he lived in Utah, and he very much wasn’t into Hollywood culture,” Shapiro said. “He was interviewing a couple potential managers, and they were all in Los Angeles, and I was like, ‘you know what, are you available to do this in person? I’ll fly out. Let’s not do this over the phone.’” Thompson was impressed with the initiative and ended up hiring Shapiro soon after they met.
The timing was fortuitous, as this was around the time that advertising agencies really began to wake up to the marketing influence of YouTubers. “It was when the MCN business was starting to erode and crumble,” said Shapiro. Multi-channel networks, by combining the reach of thousands of YouTubers at once, were supposed to bring in more revenue than a channel could generate on its own, but they ended up providing little additive value. “And so a lot of channels started to break away from the MCN, but they needed help with brand deals. They needed help understanding the entertainment landscape. That’s when agents and managers started to work with these amazing creatives coming out of YouTube.”
By late 2017, The King of Random was one of the largest channels on YouTube, with over 8 million subscribers, but Thompson was losing his motivation to continue running it. “What he wanted to do was spend more time with his family — he wanted to spend more time with his boys,” said Shapiro. By that point he had four of them. “When any creator reaches this point, there’s a pivot. They either shut down the channel entirely, or they find a way to scale it.”
Thompson’s initial inclination was to go the first route, but Shapiro and Bonham eventually nudged him toward the latter. In September 2017, Bonham appeared for the first time in front of the camera.
Paywall incoming…
The rest of this case study is behind a paywall, but if you aren’t ready to subscribe, you can also download it as an ebook over here.